


smile

by lowercasej



Category: Shoujo Kakumei Utena | Revolutionary Girl Utena
Genre: F/F, does it count as a modern au if it's still trying to stick to canon?, midlife crisis wakaba shinohara, modern au-adjacent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:14:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27308281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lowercasej/pseuds/lowercasej
Summary: It was always the smile that got to her.A smile she’d fixate on, every time she even so much as felt it coming, a perfect smile with the corners going as high as they can be, so flawless it felt like it was coming from a cartoon with how unrealistic it was.Why couldn’t she smile like that?It was because Wakaba wasn’t special, of course, she was just a boring normal girl with a boring normal girl smile, and Anthy was everything next to her, flawless and beautiful.Written forCONFESSIONAL THEATRE: A Black Rose Zine.
Relationships: Himemiya Anthy/Shinohara Wakaba
Kudos: 10





	smile

**Author's Note:**

> cw: canon-adjacent family death, mental breakdowns and attempted self-harm

Wakaba Shinohara has been in the cafe for thirty minutes.

Probably. She’s probably been in the cafe for thirty minutes, maybe. She could check! She has the laptop right in front of her, but that would require looking at the laptop and not the wall that’s directly in front of her, and wow, jeez, you’re just expecting way too much out of her right now. _Looking at work?_ In this economy? Honestly.

She may be getting paid to do actual freelance work, sure, but it’s fine. She’s just doing that thing a doctor told her once, to look away from the screen so her eyes don’t hurt! This is extremely healthy, and no she’s not going to acknowledge how she hasn’t blinked in two minutes you shut your theoretical mouth right this instant.

God, she’s going to have to look at the time, isn’t she.

…

Wakaba Shinohara has been in the cafe for two hours.

Fuck.

Okay. Okay! So maybe she disassociated for ten trillion years, that’s fine. There’s not a single word put in on her word processor, that’s also fine. Everything’s okay! She’s just going to continue her definitely-very-lucrative-please-don’t-worry-about-it career in writing, and she’ll start this very article with—

With.

Uh.

Right. _That’s_ why she was disassociating. Forgot about that.

Stupid news site. Aren’t they supposed to give you a direction for these things? Or did the ones that know how to do that shut down, and now all that’s left is dumb idiot content mills? Maybe if she started doing this ten years ago, she’d have someone with actual knowledge help her out, but now her income is tied to some dude from the UK who may or may not get her that cheque in the next six months, unless she uses some fucked up freelance loan service and gets even less out of the tiny cents she’s already earning.

Uhhhhhh. Okay, it needs to be relatable, right? Wakaba can do that, probably. She’s in her late thirties, she has depression, she lives in a city slowly getting gentrified to hell and back as people with more money than her suddenly decide she looks suspicious because she doesn’t have a Macbook like they do. Is not having a Macbook relatable? Is the fifty dollars maximum she’s getting off this article worth a bunch of randos yelling at her on Twitter over not having a Macbook?

Is that something?

Is that anything?

Yeah no who is she kidding, of course it’s not.

Guhhhhhh. This sucks! What is she supposed to get inspiration from? Nobody even talks to her in this city, because everyone’s scared of social contact, so she can’t even get any ideas off a normal conversation or anything! What the hell is she supposed to do!?

“One black tea, please.”

And furthermore—

Uh. Wait, did she hear something?

“Oh, no sugar, please.” A high-pitched voice speaks behind her, at the counter. “And no milk. Dark is good, thank you.”

With all the subtlety of a plane crash, Wakaba swings around on her chair, and right in her face is a very… interesting look. This lady is situated in the middle of a city, in the summertime, and she has a giant lavender cardigan, a white fleece shirt, a giant skirt going all the way down the ankles, and–of all the goddamn things–a white bandanna wrapped around purple hair, making her look like some type of Hamilton-type reimagining of a colonial pioneer, or a Harvest Moon character or something.

Something about her seems familiar.

This can’t be her, surely. That’d just be super silly of her to think someone from her old school was here, right? Anthy Himemiya, girl wonder of Ohtori Academy, is not in the middle of bumblefuck nowhere in America. Absolutely not.

But the voice is so _unique_ not to give her the idea. Wakaba’s never heard it outside of then, because she’s not sure that voice would have ever existed outside of that one girl, a real _particular_ voice within a real particular place. Not like here, this city she’s in is the least notable one could find. It’s not big enough to be a blip on anyone’s radar, but it’s not like it’s so small it can count as being quaint. There’s no monuments that matter, no secrets to uncover, nothing but some alright cafes and condos nobody in ther right mind would want to live in, all nestled between some gaudy brick foundation that isn’t even old enough to be endearing.

It’s just a city. The most uninteresting kind of city.

_She’d think it’d be perfect for me, wouldn’t she._

“Are you doing alright?”

Eh?

“Oh!” She was staring holes into this lady’s head for like a solid minute, whoops. “Oh, no, it’s just, eh, you seem familiar and all.”

The woman tilts her head. “Do I?”

“Yyyyyyyyes?” Is that a weird thing for her to say? God, she hasn’t talked to another human in person for so long that she doesn’t know anymore. “I mean, like, your voice is something I remember?”

 _Blink blink blink._ “Is that so.”

“Like, uh, it’s pitched up in a funny way!”

“Pitched up.”

“Yes!” Wakaba is very confident this line of reasoning isn’t insulting.

“I’m not quite sure what that means.”

“Y-you don’t?” Wakaba is no longer confident that this line of reasoning isn’t insulting. “Okay, uh, have you ever used a self check out machine at a supermarket?”

The girl nods.

“So you’ve heard that lady’s voice on there tell you what to do, right?”

She tilts her head. “Do I remind you of a self check out machine lady?”

“Yes?” Wakaba’s whole-ass range of human emotion is splattered on her face within two seconds before slamming itself back into a confused panic. “I mean wait, no! You remind me of someone else who had that voice!”

 _Blink blink blink blink._ “Okay.”

“A-are you not going to say anything else in response to that?”

“Am I supposed to?”

“Maybe?” Wakaba, swear to god, get to the point. “Okay, like, I kind of went with this line of thought assuming you’d be curious.”

“This makes sense.”

“Soooooo uh. Are you?”

Wakaba tries a smile.

It’s all pushed way too far up around the edges, the mouth’s corners placed wide enough for any competent person to not realize how tremendously bullshit it is. Wakaba’s deeply aware of this, but the end hope is that it’s kind of an endearing smile? Can fake smiles be endearing? God, she hopes so.

It might be working. The woman she’s talking to sure is staring at her a lot, at least? It might be because she thinks Wakaba is sad as hell for this play, but maybe that’s because she’s feeling pity and this plan is working somehow.

She’s staring really deep, actually.

As if she’s trying to see herself in a mirror.

…

“Yes.”

“Oh, shit, sorry um—” Wait, she heard a _yes_? “Oh! I mean, cool!”

“So, what it is you were planning on doing with this?”

“Uh.” She never actually expected to get this far, she’s now realizing. “Wrrrriting?”

“Writing.”

“ _Writing!”_

“It feels as if you forgot the rest of your sentence.”

“Absolutely fair, yes.” Okay, Wakaba, time to hopefully turn this into something before she discovers that you’re figuring this out on the spot. “So, right now, I’m trying to write something for a website. Opinionated stuff, lots of experience-based pieces and what-have-you.”

“And I am to assist in these things in some way?”

“Well, the person you remind me of was, uh, from a unique part of my life.” _Unique_ , she thinks, could win world records with all the heavy lifting it does in that sentence, but whatever, it’s fine. “It seems like a good bouncing-off point for some writing.”

“So I could help jog your memory, I suppose.” The woman sets herself down on a stool beside her, a small cup in hand. “I don’t see why I couldn’t manage that.”

This actually worked out! God willing, she might actually be able to submit this thing before midnight. So, she should just, like, start typing about it, right? Maybe just have some streams of consciousness, then move it all about until it becomes something readable, that seems vaguely like a plan.

With her fingers finally moving after a thousand years, she glances to her right, the woman curled over her tea seriously looking just like that girl from so long ago. She even does the thing where her face is almost inhumanly blank at times, not as if she isn’t showing emotion, but she’s actively hiding it all. Maybe this girl also can’t make food, or is sustained entirely on a diet of varying states of water. If she ever found the two together, she feels like she could send them to a doctor and discover a brand new condition, like there’s just some brain worm that makes you like that. They’ll call it Bad Cookitis, and the treatment plan will involve flavored syrup infused with nutrients because they’ll never eat anything else, and she is _already getting off track god damn it Wakaba—_

Nope nope nope, cutting that thought process off at the legs, Ctrl-A Backspace right this instant. The odd part wasn’t just her, anyways, it was the entire environment she was in. It was the oddest bit of architecture, completely out of place like it was supposed to be in the middle of Europe and not rural Japan. It’s not like any of the fanciness was reflected in its teaching, either, with classes that always kind of felt too dull for her to have learned anything of value, yet this weird little girl seemed like she didn’t even have to do anything to fit in, like it was all made perfectly for just her.

She supposes it makes sense, what with that weird chairman being her brother. For all she knows, he might have set the whole thing up to be literally made for her comfort? Though he couldn’t have done that good of a job, seeing there wasn’t really any way for her to eat well. Could have afforded an actual chef too, because she’s been in that dude’s car and it was just the most lavish, expensive garbage on the planet. Sheesh, what a jackass he must have been, just using it to drive around for no damn reason. Just the biggest loser on the planet. Who the hell let that kind of dipshit run a school?

And it only got worse the lower down the hierarchy you got! The entire student council, despite never doing anything that she’s pretty sure they’re supposed to do, all had these wild social complexes that made everything center around them, something Wakaba absolutely, shamefully fell for when it came to one samurai-pretending dweeb in particular. She wonders how many of those in the student council got suckered in by the chairman, because they definitely all had a similar vibe. With how creepy she felt in his car, how closed in and trapped that whole experience made her, how many of them have taken those rides with him? She was always one degree away from that, and it gives her the kind of confusing, uncomfortable feelings she never really understood until all those twitter threads about the signs of grooming, and now that she thinks about it there was a lot of leg space in that car for someone to—

“If I may.”

“Eh?” Ahhh dang it, she was starting to get on a roll, too.

The woman tilts her head, her eyes showing a vague emotion of worry. “You do realize you’ve been airing these thoughts with your voice?”

“I have?”

Wakaba glances around, and realizes that at least a half dozen people are staring at her.

“Ah. Hm. Well, now.” She quickly tries to hide in her shoulders, praying that she didn’t say the last bits of that too loudly.

“Perhaps a more private area would suffice for this sort of thing.”

* * *

Quickly flipping the light switch to her living room on, Wakaba realizes she probably should bother to clean this place more. Not like anyone ever comes over enough for her to care, though; when she first moved here, she tidied like hell every single day, expecting visitors who would shower her in compliments for how modern everything looks. Naturally, much like most of her fantasies, it never happened, and it’s not like she cared enough to ever clean it for herself, so here it sits, things piled up in a corner that she hasn’t touched in literal years.

Good thing the couch is clean enough to be on. The good ol’, reliable, extremely uncomfortable and way too cold pleather couch that wasn’t worth a single cent she paid for. _At least it’s not her bedroom_ , Wakaba thinks to herself, plopping down on one side, as the stranger-maybe-possibly-god-who-the-fuck-knows gently places herself on the other. She flips the laptop back on, and reading back what she wrote, wow yeah she’d probably think it was weird if anyone said this out loud too. She’ll just, uh, leave that writing in another tab for now.

There’s way more Wakaba has to talk about, but even beginning to put it through her digits hurts now that her mind’s racing this hard. There’s lots of implications here that she’s terrified to think too much on, words like _preying_ popping out in particular, but even once she scavenges that all out of her mind, nothing else seems to connect with that school. Hallways would stretch out forever for classrooms that are miniscule in size, the gymnasium would look teeming and gargantuan for something contained in a building she could run laps around in thirty seconds, he walk from dorms to class would last for miles and miles up until they seemed to only a minute away from the library.

She starts to hyperfixate on the forest, in particular. It was so secluded, this odd fenced-off patch of land surrounded by field, and even though she could always swear up and down that the chairman’s building was right there, whenever she looked up, the forest was to the north and the building was to the south. She feels really confident that she’s been in that forest, but it’s so fucking vague in her memories that it plants a deep anxiety in her chest.

She’s pretty sure Saionji was there. She thinks Utena was there? But the rest hazes in and out, the only thing coming up is in the form of anger. Against who? Against _Utena_? Why her, Utena was her best friend, she would never hurt her best friend! Oh god, was this why she started drifting away? Did she hurt her? She keeps trying to nail specifics in her own mind but every time she tries it’s like her own skull keeps wanting to snap itself wide open to break every attempt, as if it’s trying to protect her when all it’s actually accomplishing is making it worse because she remembers her suddenly leaving to a hospital and what if she’s dead and why does it all keep going back to knives and blood and—

Wait.

Why is there a boiling kettle on her coffee table?

“Um, excuse me.” The woman gently prods at Wakaba, shaking her out of the panic. “I made some tea.”

“You made tea?”

“Yes?” She tilts her head, like a confused dog wondering why its master isn’t praising it. “You had tea, along with spare cups, and you seemed anxious all the way here.”

“Oh.”

…

Wakaba drinks the tea.

It’s good tea. Lavender tea is nice. Wakaba ispro-lavender tea. Very, very lovely tea. She should, um, probably stop chugging it, but the lady who she guesses went into her kitchen at some point poured out some more with a spare bag, so more tea for now.

“So, if this is helping at all.” The woman looks on reassuringly. “I feel as if it’s best to try and refocus your efforts.”

“Refocus.” Wakaba kind of gets what she’s saying, but it sounds so general.

“For all of your internal discussions,” the woman says, taking a small sip of her own cup, “you haven’t actually spoken much of this girl I remind you of.”

“That’s–” _Because I am already spiraling enough as it is I’m pretty sure_ , she makes deadly sure not to air out loud. “Well, um, that’s a real complicated thing, I think.”

 _Blink blink blink blink blink._ “Would it not be far better for your story if you were to target what you plan on writing?”

“You absolutely got me on that point, yeah.” She groans, leaning back on the sofa. “Okay, I’m going to try and word it nicely, but try not to be too offended if it’s off.”

The woman nods, and Wakaba breathes in.

It was always the smile that got to her.

A smile she’d fixate on, every time she even so much as felt it coming, a perfect smile with the corners going as high as they can be, so flawless it felt like it was coming from a cartoon with how unrealistic it was.

Why couldn’t she smile like that?

It was because Wakaba wasn’t special, of course, she was just a boring normal girl with a boring normal girl smile, and Anthy was everything next to her, flawless and beautiful.

So she kept trying to feel special. Painting her nails to see if anyone noticed (they didn’t) and changing her schedule in the hopes that she could find new friends to talk to (she couldn’t), and all the while, her best friend was being with Anthy, and suddenly disappeared alongside her, so she was all alone, with all these thoughts of finding ways to make herself seem as important.

Then, one day, someone she barely knew started getting clingy with her, calling her a hero. Then people suddenly started picking fights with her. Then students started disappearing, and then fires would break out entire buildings were burning down, and when it came time for her own dorm to be smouldering, all she could do was run.

She tried to go home, only to find that her parents hadn’t lived there in five years. She spent well past her whole teenhood looking for them all over the country, but it was like they were ghosts. Her parents’ old friends were surprised when she mentioned still getting calls from them, because nobody can, but she swears their number was still in that area code.

She keeps looking, taking up as many odd jobs as she could, until one day she looks up at a news channel in a restaraunt and sees a corpse with her mother’s face and text reading _bodies of human trafficking victims discovered in riverside._

For the next decade, everything blurred. She ran further away. ran in the hopes that she could run from all that her fractured, falsified past had done to her. Maybe here, maybe in this simple little town across the ocean, she could be something else.

And she kept thinking she had that! She thought she had friends, who would believe she was cool and interesting and neat and then instead of that she kept getting people telling her she was weird, that talking to herself all the time is weird and getting overexaggerated at the smallest thing is weird and getting loud and angry every time they walked by the river is weird. She lost them, one by one, all telling her she needed to change, because they all noticed her silent anger, her quiet oppressive rage whenever people would shout her down.

And then, _and then,_ she’d go to therapy, because she’s supposed to go to therapy that’s what you _do_ when you’re like that, and the moment she sat down in the therapist’s chair she’d feel the walls closing in, like every limb was caught in the vines of roses and butterflies were sapping out her very eyes, desperately trying to claw them away before the room crushed her lungs and cracked each side of her bones, the only thing she can see being running water and that fucking _face_ , the empty lifeless face of a woman who cared for her and held her tight, over and over again, loud in its thoughts like it was screaming itself throughout her skull and there was nothing she could do to get it out, no matter how much she hurt herself to distract it, the sound of her own voice in that restaurant ringing over and over and over and over and over and _over—_

And then she was back here. Curled up into her little ball, frozen on the couch, two days later.

Apparently, she was barred from that therapist after being labeled a “special case”. Unfixable, even by their standards.

She tries a smile. It’s broken, cracks of her mask showing every time she tries, so utterly exaggerated that no adult person could ever begin to believe it. A useless smile that you only make when you’re begging for help, and you’re so weak that when you try to claw at your own body, you can’t even leave marks.

It’s a smile that’s just like the girl she wanted to be, now. It’s not normal anymore.

It’s _special_.

Wakaba is _special_.

Wakaba doesn’t want to be special anymore.

She opens her eyes again, her sobbing having spent every last bit of willpower in her muscles, and the stranger is suddenly right next to her, arms open. It’s difficult to tell herself not to take it, so she doesn’t, curling up into it, and all she can feel for the next long while is the tears hitting her hair, crying their hearts out.

Wakaba hasn’t felt normal human comfort before since she was a child. Nobody has ever gotten close enough with her for that to happen, but it feels so warm, like a safety blanket wrapped around her.

“I wish my friends from back then were still here.”

They were nice friends. Utena was kind to her, helped her as much as she could. Utena knew what this felt like, to just want to be seem as a normal girl. She was so mean to Anthy, but it was because she never realized what that smile meant, not knowing what it felt like to want to be hurt the way she must have been.

God, look at her. A sad wreck in her thirties, wanting to pretend she’s fourteen again.

How useless.

“What if we found them?”

The stranger, after ages, speaks up.

“Wh—” Wakaba’s mind suddenly resets itself at the question. “What do you mean by that?”

“What if…” She holds silent, looking like she’s trying to word this correctly. “What if I said I was looking for them all this time, too?”

It’s hard to discern, because the woman in front of her has so many emotions, but Wakaba had a hunch the first time she saw her. It’s such a stretch, so impossible it might as well be up there with all the other absurd things she’s dealt with in life, but there’s a chance, right?

Maybe there’s a chance.

“Where were the dorms located?”

 _Blink blink blink blink blink blink._ “South of the school, last I recall.”

“What was my friends’ common lunch?”

“Mostly shaved ice and tea, among other less well-cooked things that wouldn’t be discernable.”

“When would gym class start?”

“Trick question, nothing ever had a schedule and it never did until Ohtori Academy’s dying breath because the entire point was to disorient and gaslight.”

Wakaba’s eyes widen. “You’re actually here.”

“I-I, erm.” She’s almost bashful? Anthy could be bashful in a real way? “I, apologize, for not saying earlier. I did not know how you would respond to—”

Wakaba immediately clings back into her.

“I would love that.”

Anthy looks shocked, but quickly calms, the two slowly molding into their own places on each other.

Wakaba’s not allowed to live a normal life. Maybe there was never a way to, maybe everyone was destined to become an Anthy the way Anthy was, a league of sad useless children becoming sad useless adults.

At least, maybe, she could live this shattered life with a few other cracked pieces.

That would be nice.

* * *

Wakaba Shinohara has been out of the airport for thirty minutes.

Well, actually, if the stopwatch Anthy’s holding is any indication, it’s actually more like twenty eight minutes and fifty seconds, but for the purposes of her dignity, she’s rounding it up.

Almost as if it were her new fun running gag, the girl she once thought an enemy and a stranger has decided to time how long it takes for her to go from entering a new locale, to finding something new to hoard in her increasingly cramped space of belongings. Little does she know, Wakaba is now battle hardened from a good three years of travelling, and this time, she managed to pass _three_ different places selling cool toys without buying anything! Truly, she is only growing more powerful with each passing moment.

“You know, there’s a delivery service in this hotel attached to the gift shop.” Anthy stares at a little slip on the door to their room. “Quite the menu, in fact.”

“Alright, fork it over, I wanna see.”

She has yet to last an hour.

Well, that’s fine! She can just add another stuffie to her prized collection of stuffies, as she plops her suitcase down on the hotel bed. Maybe if the reward for failure wasn’t so good, she’d be more upset at this.

“Oooooh, they straight up sell _coffee beans_ through this!?” Wakaba lights up, pointing towards a kind of medium roast she’s never heard. “I wanna try this stuff.”

Anthy takes a sip of tea from her travel mug, trying to conceal a small grin. “Do you plan on getting anything to brew that with?”

“Is there anything?” Wakaba takes another look, and immediately fixates on a travel espresso maker set. “Ohhhhh my GOD THERE IS! Alright, that settles it, I’m gonna need to figure out how to work the stoves in these hotels for a change but—”

Anthy immediately started giggling.

“Wh–hey!” Wakaba attempts her best fake pout, but quickly breaks because dang it, Anthy’s laughs are too contagious. “What are you laughing about?”

“No, erm, it’s just…” Anthy gets bashful, hiding more behind her mug and pointing. “Just, um, look behind you, if you would please.”

Wakaba turns around, and finds a full length mirror, containing a girl with the biggest grin in the world.One that, for all of its wide edges and high corners, feels like it all holds together so easily and naturally, a simple little comfort emerging in every dimple she can see. There’s no cry for help in her eyes anymore, just earnesty, a genuine love of the moment she’s in as she’s with the safety of a person so dear to her.

Seems like she found a smile she wanted, after all.

How about that.


End file.
